"Retirees Now Frequently Base Their Retirement Decisions on the Portfolio Success Rates Found in Research Such as the Trinity Study.... This Is Not the Information They Need for Making Their Withdrawal Rate Decisions."

"Big Moves Out of Stocks Should Not Be Done at All. But Strategic Asset Allocation Can Be Done At Very Rare Times, Maybe Six Times in an Investor’s Lifetime, Three Times When the Market Is Stupidly High and Three Times When Stupidly Low."

"There Is An Extensive Literature About the Predictability of Long-Term Stock Returns. There Is an Extensive Literature About Short-Term Market Timing. My Question Is About Long-Term Market Timing. The Literature Seems Slim."

"For Years, the Investment Industry Has Tried to Scare Clients Into Staying Fully Invested in the Stock Market at All Times, No Matter How High Stocks Go. It's Hooey. They're Leaving Out More Than Half the Story."

"There Are Time-Periods Where Stocks Are a Terrible Addition to That Portfolio. Yet Inexplicably, We As Planners STILL tend to Suggest That It Is 'Risky' to Not Own Stocks When in Reality the Only Risk Is to Our Business."

"There Is a Growing Behavioral Economics Movement, But It So Far Has Had Limited Impact. Economists Are Not Fond of the Softness and Imprecision of Psychology. These Notions Are Considered Vaguely Unprofessional and Flaky."

"I Was Hooked on the Idea of [Passive] Index Indexing, But Something Inside Made Me Wonder "Too Good to Be True?" and "What's the Downside?" I Happened on to Your Site and Valuation-Informed Indexing Seems to Make Sense."

"Rob's Da Man! Never in the History of the Diehards Forum Has One Poster, Always Making Civil and Well Thought-Out Posts, Managed to Irritate So Many Without Anyone Being Able to Articulate a Good Reason As to Why."

"Rob Bennett: Some People Disagree With Him, and He Rubs a Lot of People the Wrong Way. But He Has Interesting Ideas About Valuation-Informed Indexing, and He Delves Into a Lot of What Makes a Successful Investing Strategy."

"The Return Predictor Is Based upon the Principle that Over the Long Term, Stock Market Prices Will Reflect the Ten-Years Earnings Growth of the Underlying Companies. Prices Return to a Common Growth Pattern."

"You Go About It in a Manner that is Catastrophically Unproductive by Adding Missionary Zeal that Inflates Your Importance and Demeans Others. The Whole Idea That There is a New School of Safe Withdrawal Rates Reeks of Personal Aggrandizement."

“What Warren Buffett Did Was Essentially Quite Close to What Rob Bennett Has Written. Buffett Has in Fact Been Cleverly Incorporating Long-Term Market Timing Based on Valuation of the Market in His Allocation of Money to Stocks.”

"You've Got to Say One Thing for Rob. He Has NEVER Lowered Himself to Ad Hominen Attacks -- Subliminal or Otherwise -- on Any Other Person on This Board. Not Once. Ever. At Least Give Him Credit for That."

"Mr. Bennett, You Are Spot on About Integrating Some Type of Valuation Filter to One's Stock Allocation. Astute Investors Have Incorporated Some Type of 'Valuation Timing' Into Their Investment Decisions Since the Beginning of Time."

"There Is Nothing More Doubtful of Success Than a New System. The Initiator Has the Enmity of All Who Profit By Preservation of the Old Institution and Merely Lukewarm Defenders in Those Who Gain By the New One."

"Difficult Subjects Can Be Explained to the Most Slow-Witted Man If He Has Not Formed Any Idea of Them. But the Simplest Thing Cannot Be Made Clear to the Most Intelligent Man If He Believes He Knows Already What Is Laid Before Him."

"I Certainly Have Seen the Academic Profession Squelching Unfashionable ideas and Have Often Been on the Wrong Side of It. Kuhn Shows How Most Pathbreaking Scientific Ideas Are Rejected at First, Usually for Decades.”

"Rob Bennett Was an Early Pioneer in 3rd Generation Modeling by Advocating (Through Various Online Forums) that Withdrawal Rates Must Be Adjusted for Market Valuations Consistent with Research by Campbell and Shiller."

"Rob Is an Enigma in the Personal Finance World. He Has Interesting Theories on Investing Based on Market Valuations. But He Weaves a Tale Which Makes the Stories of Alexander Litvinenko & Gareth Williams Seem Tame by Comparison."

"I Have Read Everything I Can About Valuation-Informed Indexing. Buy-and-Hold Is Extremely Problematic. I Respect the Passion, Hard Work and Research That You Have Put Into This Very Important Issue. Your Work Has Huge Value."

"The Amount of Return You Can Expect From a Diversified Equity Portfolio Is Inversely Correlated to the Market Valuation at the Start of the Holding Period. It Is One of the Most Robust Statistical Relationships in Modern Finance."

"I've Had Similar Experiences. I Know of Two Young Professors Who Wanted to Do Research on Fundamental Index and Reported to Me That Their Colleagues Advised Them That This Line of Research Could Derail Their Career Prospects."

"As with Drug Studies Funded by Drug Companies, It Would Be Churlish to Suppose that the Chicago School of Business Was in the Bag. But It Would Also Be Idealistic to Assume That There Was No Funding Bias at All."

"This Sort of Intimidation Is Not Acceptable. The Cigarette and Pharmaceutical Industries Found Research Supporting Their Products By Funding It. But That Was Big Money Supporting Outcomes, Not Dissuading Others."

"The Situation [Referring to the Intimidation Tactics Used to Silence Academic Researcher Wade Pfau's Reporting of the Dangers of Buy-and-Hold Investing Strategies] Seems Well Below Any Professional and Academic Acceptable Standards."

"It Is Obvious that Rob, in Attempting to Identify New Safe Withdrawal Rate Strategies...Is Goring Your Ox. If Rob Improves on [the] Safe Withdrawal Rate Methodology, the Implication Is Clear: You Are All, Metaphorically, Out of Business."

"Naturally, I Am Finding That Valuation-Informed Indexing Can Allow You to Reach a Wealth Target With a Lower Saving Rate and to Use a Higher Withdrawal Rate in Retirement Than You Could With a Fixed Allocation."

"A Careful Examination of Past Returns Can Establish Some Probabilities About the Prospective Parameters of Return, Offering Intelligent Investors a Basis for Rational Expectations About Future Returns."

"How Can It Be That One-Year Returns Are So Apparantly Random and Yet Ten-Year Returns Are Mostly Forecastable? In Looking at One-Year Returns, One Sees a Lot of Noise. But Over Longer Time Intervals the Noise Effectively Averages Out and Is Less Important."

"The Notion That Rich Valuations Will Not Be Followed By Sub-Par Long-Term Returns Is a Speculative Idea That Runs Counter to All Historical Evidence. It Is an Iron Law of Finance That Valuations Drive Long-Term Returns."

"It's January and the Temperature Is Below Freezing. If You Asked Me Whether It Will be Warmer or Cooler Next Tuesday, I Would Be Unable to Say. However, If You Asked Me What Temperature to Expect on April 9, I Could Predict "Warmer Than Today" and Almost Surely Be Right."

"If the Response Is "Who Knew?", It Won't Be Much Comfort for Retirees in the Employment Line at Wal-Mart. This is Especially True Since a Rational Understanding of History and the Drivers of Longer-Term Stock Returns Can Help Retirees To Avoid That Surprise."

"New of the Demise of the Random Walk Has Only Very Slowly Spread, In Part Because Its Overthrow Came as a Shock. If the Random Walk Hypothesis Were Correct, the Most Likely Return Would Be the Historic Average Return. The Evidence, However, Is Strongly Against This."

"I Don't Care If You Do or Don't Believe That the Market Will Behave Similarly in the Future As It Has in the Past. Either Way, This [The Stock-Return Predictor] Is an Excellent Way to Understand What the Market Has Done In the Past."

"It Really Is a Shame and Indefensible That So Many Feel the Need to Jump Into It With No Interest of Posting on the Topic But Just to Disrupt. Are You That Insecure? Some on the Forum Have an Interest in This Topic. If You Don't, Stay Out!"

"Irrational Behavior Does Follow Patterns. But How Many Experts in Behavioral Finance Believe That Such Knowledge Can Be Used to Predict Markets? Basically, None. Your Model Cannot Attain the Level of Predictive Value You Claim."

"The Safe Withdrawal Rate Studies Are Based on History. This [The Retirement Risk Evaluator] Shows, Based on the Same History, What the Probabilities Are for the Future at Various Starting Points. If the First Has Value, Then Surely This Does Too."

"There Are Hundreds of People Who Contributed to This. This Calculator [The Stock-Return Predictor] Demonstrates in a Compelling Way the Power of This New Internet Discussion-Board Communications Medium."

"A P/E10 of'26' Is Bad. Now Look at the 30-Year Return Predicted by the Calculator -- 5.4 Percent Real. That's Not Bad. There Are All Sorts of Strategic Implications That Follow From Understanding That Stocks Provide Different Sorts of Returns Over Different Sorts of Time-Periods."

"I Would Never Invest in Anything Without Having Any Idea What the Expected Return Is. For Instance, I Would Not Walk Into a Bank And Say "I'll Take One Certificate of Deposit, Please" WIthout Asking What Rate They Are Offering."

"I've Seen Things Said on Investing Boards That I Have Never Heard Said in Discussions of Any Non-Investing Topic. The Question of Whether Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns Is a Topic That Causes People More Emotional Angst Than Does Abortion or Impeachment Proceedings or the War in Iraq."

"It's Not Possible For Those Who Have Come to Believe That Stocks Are Always Best to Accept that Valuations Matter. The Two Beliefs Are Mutually Exclusive. If Valuations Matter, There Is Obviously Some Valuation Level At Which Stocks Are Not Best. The Two Paradigms Cannot Be Reconciled."

"Dear Rob -- I Just Became Aware of Your Past Research in September. Since Then, I've Read Archives From Many Discussion Boards and Websites, and I Always Find Your Writing to Be Very Interesting and Intriguing."

"I Think Rob Bennett Did Provide An Important Contribution in Terms of Describing a Way for P/E10 to Guide Asset Allocation for Long-Term Conservative Investors. I Also Think He Was Right on the Issue of Safe Withdrawal Rates."

"Because the Precise Timing of This Mean Reversion Is Not Known in Advance, Expecting the Result to Happen in the Short-Term Will Not Be Possible. But Long-Term Investors Who Can Be Patient Can Wait for This Mean Reversion and Will Eventually Come Out Ahead."

"Your Work Is at Odds with the Ethos of the Board -- Here the Theme is John Bogle's Philosophy, Which Eschews Market Timing. This Board Came Into Existence to ESCAPE One Individual, the Very Individual With Whom You Have Openly Aligned Yourself."

"Why Is It Such an Odious Violation of the Tenets of Bogleheadism to Explore Whether Someone Who Has Enough Patience Might Be Able to Benefit from the Transitory Nature of Speculative Returns (the Idea That the P/E Ratio Eventually Ends Up Where It Started)?"

"Let Me Explain Why I Posted About This Here. Valuation-Informed Indexing Has Had Critics for Years. But Until Norbert Did It In 2008, Nobody Seemed to Have Provided a Serious Investigation of It. I Couldn't Understand Why. That Bothered Me."

"If You Really Don't Like Market Timing in Any and All Forms, You May Not See Any Point in an Empirical Investigation. You View Me as One of a Long Line of Hucksters Trying to Sell You Some Snake Oil. I Don't Want to Be Such a Person."

"Having a Completely Ineleastic Demand for Equities Is a Bit Bonkers. No One Acts That Way with Life's Other Important Commodities. Campbell Advocates a Linear Valuations-Based Strategy so That You Wouldn't Be Making Big Changes. This Would Be Like Rebalancing But More Flexible."

"The Whole Idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing Belongs to You. Do You Mind if I call the Paper 'Valuation-Informed Indexing'? I Would Give You Credit. I Have Been Toying With the Idea of Sending the Paper to the Journal of Finance, Which Is the Most Prestigious Journal in Academic Finance."

"I Definitely Need to Cite You as the Founder of Valuation-Informed Indexing, As I Have Not Found Anyone Else Who Can Lay Claim to That. Shiller Pointed Out the Predictive Power of P/E10 But Never Discussed How to Incorporate It Into Asset Allocation, As Far As I Know."

"I Tested a Wide Variety of Assumptions About Asset Allocation, Valuation-Based Decision Rules, Whether the Period Is 10, 20, 30 or 40 Years, and Lump-Sum vs. Dollar-Cost Averaging To Show That the Results Are Quite Robust to Changes In Any of These Assumptions."

"I Wrote Up the Programs to Test Your Valuation-Informed Indexing Strategies Against Buy-and-Hold and I Am Quite Excited. You Say in the RobCast That VII Should Beat Buy-and-Hold About 90 Percent of the Time. I Am Getting Results That Support This."

"Never Underestimate the Power of a Dominant Academic Idea to Choke Off Competing Ideas, and Never Underestimate the Unwillingness of Academics to Change Their Views in the Face of Evidence. They Have Decades of Their Research and Academic Standing to Defend."

"Since They Did Not Diagnose the Disease, There Is Little Popular Confidence That They Know the Cure. What If Economics Is, Actually, At the Same Level as Medicine Was When Doctors Still Believed in the Application of Leeches?"

"I Love the Humans Dearly (the Title of the Book I Am Writing Is Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life) But They Can Be a Trial at Times. Hey! Helping the Humans Learn What It Takes to Invest Effectively Is Not All That Different From Being Married!

"Wow, I Did Not Realize You Had Achieved This Much Success and Had Many Devoted Believers/Followers. That’s Great, Then Ignore the Opposition. It Is Great to Have Opposition: That Means You Are Doing Something Right."

"I Do NOT Believe I Know It All. I Believe That Shiller Discovered Something Very Important and It Appalls Me That More People Are Not Exploring the Implications of His Findings. My Aim Is To Launch a National Debate."

"I LOVE Everything About Buy-and-Hold Other Than the Failure to Encourage Investors to Take Price Into Consideration When Setting Their Stock Allocations. That's a Mistake That Was Made Because Shiller’s Research Was Not Available at the Time The Strategy Was Being Developed."

"Valuation-Informed Indexing Sounds Like a Real Thing. If It Is and I Can Thoroughly Understand It, Then It Will End Up In My Classrooms and in My Students' Minds (Of Course, With References to You and Wade)."

"As a Fan of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I Know That Progress Can Be Frustratingly Slow and What Is Typically Needed Is Either a Crisis or the Ascent of a New Generation of Scientists Who Did Not Build Their Careers on the Old Models and Theories."

"Rob Gets Himself So Worked Up Over What Someone Else Is Doing With Their Own Money and Not Bothering Rob in the Least. As Long As They Aren't Knocking on Your Basement Door, What Do You Care? They Are Happy and Content. Leave Well Enough Alone and Focus on Your Own Account."

"I've Been on Forum Since the BBS Days and I Think Rob is Special. He Could Be an Internet Meme If He Put Some Effort Into It. Someday, He Will Realize That the Only Thing He's Good At Is Being an Epic Loser. He Just Needs to Embrace That Idea and Run With It. Watch Out, LOLCats, Here Comes Pathetic Guy!"

"You Guys [the Greaney Goons] Are the Same Jokers Who Have Done This Before, Sparring with Rob Over Nonsensical Issues On This Site and Others, Leveling Personal Attacks, and You Don't Even Use Real Names! Rob Is Entitled to His Opinion, But the Fact That You Challenge Every Jot and Tittle of What He Says Makes It Clear You Have An Unholy Agenda. Please Take It Elsehwere."

"Rob, Take This As Friendly Advice. You're a Smart and Articulate Guy and You Could Be Making Valuable Contributions to This Discussion. I've Dealt with the Mentally Ill Before and I've Found That They Sometimes Can Be Reasonable If Gently Redirected."

"I’m a Numbers Guy. And I Believe I Understand Rob’s Thesis, that Future Returns, Over the Next Decade, Have a Tight Inverse Correlation to the PE10 for the Starting Point. Remember, Correlation Doesn’t Need to be 100%, Only That There’s a Bell Curve of Potential Outcomes that Shift Meaningfully Based on the Input."

"I Have had Academic Researchers Tell Me That They Dream of the Day When They Will be Able to do Honest Research Once Again. I Have had Investment Advisors Tell me That They Dream of the Day When They Will be Able to Give Honest Investing Advice Again."

"Let’s Call a Spade a Spade, Shall We? Wade Pfau Stole Your Research and Put His Name on it, Throwing You Just a Tiny Crumb of Acknowledgement to Ward Off a Lawsuit. He’s Profiting Handsomely By His Theft, Leading a Charmed Life, Widely Published, Widely Respected. While Rob Bennett Continues to Toil in Total Obscurity. It’s So Incredibly Unfair, I Think If It Happened to Me, It Could Actually Drive Me Insane."

Juicy Excerpt: The poll shows that the explanations people give for liking Tebow or Manning are rationalizations. People decide for emotional reasons who to support and then turn on the brainpower to concoct explanations for those emotional beliefs that sound sensible. When stocks are priced at three times fair value, there will be dozens of reasons put forward for why the price being set by the market is the proper one. Don’t believe any of it. It is always possible to come up with both plausible-sounding reasons for high prices and plausible-sounding reasons for low prices. Most investing analyses (including this one, to be sure) are so much hot air.

Juicy Comment: You even built your own bias into your headline (naming Tebow rather than Manning).

I recently started a discussion-board thread at the Early Retirement Extreme site titled Is Buy-and-Hold Just a Marketing Pitch?
Juicy Excerpt #1: I think this may be the warmest reception I have heard to my criticism of Buy-and-Hold at any place on the internet. Usually, I duck immediately after pushing the "Send" button to avoid the bricks being thrown at me. Here, I almost feel that in fairness I should jump in and defend the Buy-and-Hold position!
Juicy Excerpt #2: I don't think "Buy…

I have posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Invest It Wisely site called The Biggest Unknown Risk of Stock Investing.
Juicy Excerpt: My strong sense is that most investors have not thought through carefully what it means to stick with stocks for the long run. To try to stick with stocks for the long run and fail to do so is the worst of all possible worlds. The possibility of becoming a failed Buy-and-Hold investor is the biggest unknown risk of stock investing.
Juicy Comment #1: I agree…

I recently wrote a guest blog entry at the Shark Investor blog entitled I'd Be the Growlingest Bear on the Internet if Only I Were a Bear.
Juicy Excerpt: I’m a reporter. I report things. That’s how I’ve made my living for a long time. Never have I seen such an emotional reaction to anything I have reported as I have seen after reporting what the historical data says about how stocks are likely to perform over the next 10 years.
Today's Passion: The other version of this one includes…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Options for Rookies blog. It's called Advice on Options from a Fellow Who Knows Nothing About Options.
You won't see the blog entry if you follow the link. Mark Wolfinger, the owner of the blog, explains why in comments that now appear at the link under the headline "Guest Blog. Deleted."
Juicy Excerpt: Permitting this specific guest blogger to post here has opened an unintentional can of worms. I do not want to be involved in his…

I've posted Entry #2 to my weekly column at the Balance Junkie site. It's titled Why We Are Afraid to Acknowledge the True Cause of the Economic Crisis.
Juicy Except: My boys (Timothy, age 12, and Robert, age 9) and I were watching a DVD of the old television series I’ll Fly Away a few days ago. The series tells the story of the civil rights struggle of the early 1960s and how it affected the people of a small town in South Carolina. There’s one scene that we watched that I believe…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Budgeting in the Fun Stuff blog. It's called The Last Days of Stock Investing Risk.
Juicy Excerpt: You can never eliminate risk entirely because short-term returns are not at all predictable. But there is now 33 years of peer-reviewed research showing that long-term returns are highly predictable for those who consider valuations. Risk is optional! Go with a high stock allocation when prices are low, a moderate stock allocation when prices are at…

Set forth below are eight Guest Blog Entries I have written dealing with the Valuation-Informed Indexing investment strategy or that others have written commenting on it.
1) The Risks of Buy-and-Hold Investing, at the Pop Economics blog.
2) Valuation-Informed Indexing Is Risk-Diminished Investing, submitted to Pop Economics but ultimately posted at A Rich Life.
3) When Stock Prices Crash, Where Does the Money Go?, at the Budgets Are Sexy blog.
4) Stock Market Strategy: Timing Based…

Welcome to the July 2012 Carnival of Passive Investing, a monthly collection of the best and most intelligent Passive Investing strategy articles around the internet. Some people foolishly want to beat the market (want being the key word) but we just want to invest with it.
The purpose of the carnival is two-fold:
To provide a forum to showcase articles and research in passive investing strategies (i.e. investing in ETFs, index mutual funds, etc. in such a way that one avoids…

Set forth below is the text of a Guest Blog Entry that I recently submitted to my friend "Pop" at the Pop Economics blog. Pop asked that I take a different focus and on Saturday I submitted a different version. So I thought I would set forth here the language of the initial take. It's entitled "Valuation-Informed Investing Is Risk-Diminished Investing."
My name is Rob Bennett. I am the author of a Google Knol entitled “Why Buy-and-Hold Investing Can Never Work” and argue for an…

A number of personal finance bloggers have engaged in a good discussion of The Matter That Consumes Us All at the thread at the Hope to Prosper Blog relating to my guest post titled The Economic Crisis Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.
Of particular import is an exchange between the blogger Roshawn @ Watson Inc. and me, set forth below:
Roshawn @ Watson Inc: Okay Rob, Your article has intrigued me. My immediate inclination is the same as Bret: cool concept but applying it…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Invest It Wisely site titled Stocks Are Far More Risky When Valuations Are High.
Juicy Excerpt: My interpretation of these numbers is that stocks are a less risky asset class than most believe. So long as you limit yourself to buying stocks only at moderate or better prices and commit to a 10-year holding period, you are virtually guaranteed to at least break even. That’s a very good deal, given the upside potential that applies when stocks are…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Hope to Prosper site called How Has Buy-and-Hold Survived So Long?
Juicy Excerpt: There are now thousands of books promoting Buy-and-Hold. There are hundreds of calculators promoting Buy-and-Hold. There are thousands of experts who made their reputations promoting Buy-and-Hold. In short, there are lots of powerful people and institutions with a strong financial interest in promoting the failed strategy rather than its…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the My Personal Finance Journey site called The Magic (and Limits) of Using Historical Data to Guide Your Investing Decisions.
Juicy Excerpt: Whenever I find myself saying something negative about Buy-and-Hold (which is often!), I make it a point to add a mention somewhere of how much respect and affection and gratitude I feel for the Buy-and-Holders. One of the reasons I feel this way is that I believe so strongly that they are on the right track in…

The blogger who owns the Bad Money Advice site has put forward a post offering reasoned skepticism re the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy. The title of the post is The Truth About the Shiller PE. Good stuff, Frank!
Juicy Excerpt #1: "I do not know that Prof. Shiller has ever gone so far as to advocate that people use cyclically adjusted PE (CAPE) to make investment decisions."
Juicy Excerpt #2: "Shiller does his best to warn people off relying on CAPE, saying that it 'has to be…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Sustainable Personal Finance blog titled Are Investing Experts Ethical?
Juicy Excerpt: By the standards that apply in most other fields of life endeavor, the investing advice field is frighteningly corrupt. I worked for several years as a tax lobbyist (hey, we all have a past!). So it takes something special in the department of ethical lapses to shock me. The investing advice field is something truly special in this…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Financial Uproar site entitled It's the End of the Investing World As We Know It (and I feel Fine).
Juicy Excerpt: We are up against something very big here. When we discovered that it is not the sun that revolves around the earth but the earth that revolves around the sun we started a revolution in science. We tapped into many powerful insights in the years since as a result of that one, simple, fundamental change in our understanding of how the world…

Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent to the author of the Pop Economics Blog on February 25:
Pop:
This is Rob Bennett, author of the "A Rich Life" blog.
Rajiv Sethi linked yesterday to your blog entry defending the Buy-and-Hold model from my criticisms of it. In my comment (at the bottom of the long comments section), I said that I would contact you to see if you have an interest in hosting a Guest Blog Entry by me responding to the points you made in the "Rob Bait"…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for an article on Valuation-Informed Indexing appearing at the Invest It Wisely site:
Look at the orange line at the bottom of Fig. 6: it follows the stock line (in black) most of the time, this is just plain buy-and-hold as long as valuations are sane. This strategy is closer to buy-and-hold than to, say, day-trading or stock picking.
I certainly agree that the strategy you suggest (I call it…

Jacob at the My Personal Finance Journey blog has posted a blog entry tiled Valuation-Informed Indexing vs. Passive Investing: Which Is Better?
Juicy Excerpt #1: While Valuation-Informed Index Investing may have outperformed passive investing in most previous historical periods, evidence of it not performing as well in recent years is enough to keep me as a passive investor, at least until VII is refined.
Juicy Excerpt #2: Valuation-Informed Index Investing has great potential because it…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Future Storm blog. It's entitled What the Stock Investing Experts Don't Want You to Know.
Juicy Excerpt: The experts are experts in selling first, second, third and fourth. They don’t tell us what we need to know about stocks but only what we want to know about stocks. We all wanted to think that those insane prices could continue indefinitely. That was of course a hopeless dream. But the experts did not want to be the ones to let us know. They…

It's the "experts" who got us into our current economic mess. It's does not make too much sense to think that it's going to be the "experts" who are going to get us out.
We need new ideas. New ideas come from new places.
That's why my first choice of a partner for my initiative on getting the word out to middle-class investors about what we have learned about the realities of stock investing over the past seven years was the author of the Frugal Dad blog. Frugal Dad is a smart fellow, a…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the My Personal Finance Journey blog titled The Coming Revolution in Our Understanding of How Stock Investing Works.
Juicy Excerpt: If the market is efficient both in the short-term and in the long-term, Buy-and-Hold is the perfect strategy. The only way to capture the high returns of stocks is to be heavily invested in them and, since there is no way to predict returns, the only thing to do is to remain heavily invested in stocks at all times.
However,…

I recently wrote a guest blog entry for the My Life ROI blog entitled I Learned How to Invest by Learning How to Save.
Juicy Excerpt: If you have ever tried to save effectively, you know that price matters. Big time. It’s common knowledge that that’s so with everything other than stocks. By learning how to save, and by then not forgetting the lesson just because the experts were telling me that different rules apply with stocks, I learned how to invest.
Some wild comments posted…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Money & Such blog entitled Stocks Are a Lot Less Risky Than You Think.
Juicy Excerpt: The price volatility of stocks is an illusion. It’s not real. Change how you react to it and it goes away. Stop taking volatility seriously and it goes “Poof!”.
There were several good comments posted in response to the blog entry.
Juicy Excerpt: I think you provide a unique approach to the topic. It sounds to me very similar to the idea of…

I've posted my second Guest Blog Entry at the Arbor Investment Planner blog. It's called Asset Allocation Advisors Cause Financial Crisis.
Juicy Excerpt: There is no study supporting Buy-and-Hold. The idea that academic research supports this approach is a myth. People really do believe in it; both experts and ordinary investors. But they don’t believe in it because of a study they have read. They believe in it because experts endorse it and because it is rarely challenged.
We have…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Consumerism Commentary site titled Are Stock Gains and Losses Real?
Juicy Excerpt: Losses suffered starting from super-high prices are never recovered. When you pay more than a fair price for stocks, a portion of your money is going to the purchase of stocks and a portion is going to the purchase of cotton-candy nothingness. Prices always return to fair value. So these price drops are not so much losses as they are the market coming to recognize phony…

Set forth below are links to Guest Blog Entries I wrote dealing with the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy and to discussion-board threads relating to the new stock investing approach:
1) What Bogle Says About Valuation-Informed Indexing, at the Balance Junkie site;
2) How Has Buy-and-Hold Survived So Long?, at the Hope to Prosper site;
3) How to Change Your Stock Allocation in Response to Valuation Shifts, at the Free From Broke site;
4) Predicting Stock Returns for Fun and…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Out Of Your Rut blog. It's called Cash Is a Strategic Asset Class.
Juicy Excerpt: Nobody makes much money promoting TIPS or other cash-like investment classes. The “experts” in the investing advice field HATE cash. No commissions. No acceptance into the “Experts” Club. No appeal to the Get Rich Quick impulse lurking within each and every one of us that tempts us into ignoring price when choosing our investment classes.
Keith Mercadante,…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Weakonomics blog entitled The Bankers Did Not Do This to Us!
Juicy Excerpt: Did they stick all the money in suitcases and catch a plane to another time zone?
Some good comments.
Juicy Excerpt: I’m getting more and more tired of people shoving blame back and forth. I frankly, could care less whose fault it is. I’d rather spend time trying to find the best solution…

Set forth below are eight Guest Blog Entries discussing various aspects of the Valuation-Informed Indexing investing strategy and on the Passion Saving money management strategy.
1) The Future of Investing, at the Get Rich Slowly forum (this is actually a thread-starter at a discussion board rather than a Guest Blog Entry -- I put it forward in this form at the request of J.D. Roth, the owner of both the blog and the forum).
2) Why Buy-and-Hold Investing Can Never Work (this is actually a…

Set forth below are links to seven Guest Blog Entries I wrote about the Valuation-Informed Indexing investing strategy:
1) The Buy-and-Hold Myth at Married with Debt;
2) What Kind of Investor Are You?, at Don't Quit Your Day Job;
3) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is Flawed, at Don't Quit Your Day Job;
4) If Buy-and-Hold Doesn't Work, Then What?, at Don't Quit Your Day Job;
5) Are Stock Gains and Losses Real? at Consumerism Commentary;
6) Are Safe Withdrawal Rates Really…

The Integritive Advisor, the quarterly journal of The Association for Integrative and Financial Life Planning, has published an article by me in its September issue. The article is entitled Humble Money Experts Are the Best Money Experts.
Juicy Expert #1: When it comes to admitting and correcting mistakes, I have found that the people who make a living in the money advice business leave a great deal to be desired.
Juicy Excerpt #2: As of today, not too many will tolerate uncertainty in…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Improve the Quality blog entitled Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires -- and Bull Markets!
Juicy Excerpt: We cannot wait until prices are insanely high to warn people that they must sell their stocks, however. By then, people are too caught up in the fantasy thinking that characterizes bull markets to listen to reasonable advice. I think we need a change in our mindset toward stock investing. We need to think of the stock market as a community…

I posted as Guest Blog Entry at the Married (with Debt) blog yesterday. It's called The Buy-and-Hold Myth.
Juicy Excerpt: In the used-car market, the price of the car being sold is the result of a battle waged between the car seller and the car buyer. The seller wants a high price. The buyer wants a low one. Each side has to give something or risk seeing the negotiation fall through. The end result of the battle is usually a price that is more or less right. The car-selling market…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Digerati Life blog. It's called The No-Stock Portfolio: Zero Stocks for 15 Years and Doing Fine!
Juicy Excerpt: What if you were to take stock price into consideration when setting your stock allocation with the understanding that it might take as long as 10 years to see a payoff for doing so? In that case, you would be almost certain to see the payoff. Long-term timing always works. At least it always has (in the past).
It’s not hard to…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance blog. It's called What's the Best Age at Which to Experience a Stock Crash?
Juicy Excerpt: For young investors who have established themselves in good careers before a crash hits, the crash can actually be a big plus. Stock valuations always go to one-half of fair value before the bear market comes to an end. When stocks are priced at one-half fair value, the most likely annualized 10-year return is 15 percent real.…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Balance Junkie blog titled How to Use Valuation-Informed Indexing -- Part One.
Juicy Excerpt: There is one important factor that can never be priced in to your purchase of an index fund — overvaluation. To overvalue a fund is to misprice it. Mispricing by definition can never be factored into the price you pay and must be considered separately.
Say that you pay two times the fair price for an income stream of 6 percent real. You obviously are…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I put yesterday to a thread on Valuation-Informed Indexing at the My Personal Finance Journey site. The blog entry was posted some time ago. I only discovered the most recent posts by Carlyle (to which my post responded) yesterday.
I would say is that the notion that Buy-and-Hold had anything to do with the economic downturn is beyond ridiculous.
You speak for many with these words, Carlyle. I wish that one of those who feel this way would try…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Weakonomics blog entitled Rational Investing in Irrational Markets.
Juicy Excerpt: But wait. The market is rational. A rational market would price stocks properly. There cannot be overvaluation in a market that is rational. Belief in the one idea logically rules out belief in the…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Moolanomy blog entitled The Difference Between the Multiply-by-25 Rule and the 4-Percent Rule.
Juicy Excerpt: I believe strongly that the 4-Percent Rule at some times overstates and at other times understates the amount needed for a safe retirement; at times of high valuations the true safe withdrawal can drop to as low as 2 percent and at times of low valuations it can rise to as high as 9 percent. The Multiply-by-25 Rule isn’t by itself…

Set forth below is a Guest Blog Entry by Larry Weber, a new community member. I've taken the words from a post that Larry put last night to an earlier thread.
Rob,
I think we have found some common ground.
There was absolutely no “main street/stream” investment type that agreed with my decision back in late 2006 when I opted out of the market (to be precise 92 percent out of the market). They thought I was crazy for leaving the market based on conventional investment wisdom at the…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Blunt Money blog. It's called "Talk Back to the Investing Experts."
Juicy Excerpt: Investing experts are like everybody else. They are flawed humans. They get things wrong. And they are inclined not to admit it too readily. They do more harm to their reputations in the long run by failing to do so, of course. They need our help.
Does that sound to you like the sort of thing that might undermine national security? Does it sound like hate speech?…

I've written a Guest Blog Entry for the Own the Dollar blog titled Stock Crashes and Recessions Often Hurt Young Investors Most.
Juicy Excerpt: The young investor may well have lost close to 20 years of compounding returns because of the bull market of the 1990s before the consequences of the huge bull are behind us. But he did not personally experience any of the gains! Older investors frontloaded their gains. Younger investors have never experienced any…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Everyday Tips and Thoughts blog. It's called Stocks Are Not Risky for Those Willing to Tune Out the Wall Street Mumbo Jumbo.
Juicy Excerpt: The people who are cited in the media as investment “experts” are almost all employed by Wall Street. Wall Street makes lots of money when you invest in stocks and hardly anything when you invest in other asset classes. So 90 percent of the “experts” are compromised. They are not experts in how to invest…

I recently wrote a guest blog for the Free Money Finance blog entitled Timing Doesn't Work -- Or Does It?
Juicy Excerpt: Too many investing experts have fallen into the lazy habit of saying that timing doesn't work without making the distinction between short-term timing and long-term timing.
A community member named "Brian S." offered an extremely helpful comment.
Juicy Excerpt: David Swensen, the investment manager for the Yale Endowment, discusses this in his book "Unconventional…

George, the blogger at the Investing Online AI blog, has written a post advocating the use of P/E10 to know when it is dangerous to own stocks. George learned about Valuation-Informed Indexing from a Guest Blog Entry that I wrote at another site and we had a long telephone conversation the other night in which we discussed the wonders of the P/E10 stock valuation metric. His blog entry is titled P/E10 -- A Tool for Investing.
Juicy Excerpt: If there were a way to know if the market was…

Welcome to the May 2, 2011, edition of the Carnival of Passive Investing (#5), a monthly collection of the best and most intelligent Passive Investing strategy articles around the internet. Some people foolishly want to beat the market (want being the key word) but we just want to invest with it.
We have some exciting news to report about next month's carnival. Rick Ferri, the author of numerous books on Passive Investing, will be selecting the winners of the May Carnival of Passive…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Money and Such blog entitled We're All Better Off As a Result of the Stock Crash.
Juicy Excerpt: If you have one-third less in your portfolio today than you had pre-crash, you have a better chance of meeting your retirement goal in 10 years than you possessed pre-crash.
Juicy Excerpt #2: We need to assure people to persuade them to stay invested in stocks. But we cannot assure them without letting them know how important valuations are to…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the "Money and Such" blog entitled Passive Investing Is a Strategy for Extremists.
Juicy Excerpt: The word “passive” sounds neutral. It sounds moderate. I don’t think the investing philosophy is that at all. The investing philosophy argues for taking no action whatsoever when the risk of holding stocks increases dramatically.
This is the blog entry that was viewed by the owner of the "Lazy Man and Money" blog as "too hot to…

Set forth below are links to eight Guest Blog Entries that I have written on the Valuation-Informed Indexing investing strategy or that others have written commenting on it (actually one is about the Passion Saving strategy of money management -- how did that one get mixed in?!).
1) Stock Volatility Kills, at the Moolanomy blog.
2) Why Long-Term Timing Works Even Though Short-Term Timing Doesn't, at the Money and Such blog.
3) We're All Better Off as a Result of the Stock Crash, at the…

I recently engaged in a discussion of the Efficient Market Theory at the Early Retirement Extreme Forum. The thread is titled Is Efficient Market a Theory, Hypothesis, Fact, Law or Notion?
Juicy Excerpt #1: I want to be fair in my descriptions. I don't want to underplay the extent to which I believe the evidence has been misinterpreted. I believe that this misinterpretation has caused a great deal of misery. So I want to be firm on this point. But I also want to be fair. I don't want to be…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Planting Money Seeds blog. It's called My Crush on Kathy and What It Means re Your Section 401(k) Account.
Juicy Excerpt: I didn’t hear the words at the time. I have this amazing filter thing in my brain that doesn’t let in words that cut like a knife. I heard the words well enough to recall them to mind today, when they make me laugh. But for so long as those words caused more pain than I could handle — No words! It’s like a magic…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Free Money Wisdom site. It's called You Need to Change How You Think About Stock Investing.
Juicy Excerpt: If we assume that stocks will continue to perform in the future somewhat as they always have in the past (that is, that we will see a long-term return of something in the neighborhood of 6.5 percent real), we are all a LOT better off if stock prices fall 50 percent next year than we are if they rise 50 percent next year.
$2,106,761. That’s what…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry to the Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance blog titled Six Dangerous Investing Myths.
Juicy Excerpt: Stocks are more risky than bonds.This has been the conventional wisdom for a long, long time. But risk is uncertainty. If Shiller is right that long-term returns are highly predictable, stocks are not nearly as risky as we have long believed them to be. If Shiller is right, stocks are a high-risk asset class only for those who don’t take valuations into…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Free Money Wisdom blog. It's titled What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Stock Investing Turned Out to be Wrong?
Juicy Excerpt: Pfau’s most recent paper examines the one study that really did conclude that long-term timing does not work. The new paper states that: “Valuation-based market timing demonstrates greater potential to improve risk-adjusted returns for conservative long-term investors than given credit by Fisher and Statman…

Set forth below are links to eight Guest Blog Entries on the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy:
1) Is Buy-and-Hold Just a Marketing Gimmick? (this is actually a thread-starter at the Early Retirement Extreme Forum);
2) Risk Revisited (this is actually a thread-starter at the Early Retirement Extreme Forum);
3) Don't Give Up on Stocks, Give Up on Buy-and-Hold, at The Daily Middle;
4) It's Impossible to Plan a Retirement Without Looking at Valuations, at Financial Uproar;
5)…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance blog titled Predicting Stock Returns for Fun and Profit.
Juicy Excerpt: My guess is that most people don’t bother trying to make long-term predictions because they assume it would take a lot of work to pull them off. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every factor that affects the price of a broad stock index is reflected in the price of that index. So you don’t need to worry about inflation or productivity…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Smarter Wallet blog entitled Stock Market Strategy: Market Timing Based on Long-Term Views.
Juicy Excerpt: If prices can be wildly wrong in the short term but must be roughly right in the long term, it should be possible to know in advance which way prices are headed (in the long term only, not in the short term) just by knowing the valuation level you are starting from. Researchers have checked the historical data. This explanation, unlike the…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Save Buy Live blog entitled Talk Back to the Investing Experts.
Juicy Excerpt: If you messed up in your job, you would expect to be held accountable. Should we not hold the investing experts accountable when they mess up and cause us to lose big bunches of money? I sure think we…

I will be writing a monthly column on the dangers of Buy-and-Hold and on our need to move on as a society to promotion of the Valuation-Informed Indexing model at the Balance Junkie site. My first entry there is called The Gene Mauch Rule for Investing Success.
Juicy Excerpt: Bull markets are the stock market’s equivalent to baseball winning streaks. During bull markets, the temptation is to get overly excited about stocks, to count the phony and temporary bull market gains as permanent.…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Free From Broke site called How to Change Your Stock Allocation in Response to Valuation Shifts.
Juicy Excerpt: Stock valuations do not jump randomly from super-low levels to super-high levels. They change gradually over a 30-year or 35-year time period. They start at super-low levels, move to fair-value levels, continue moving up until they reach insanely high levels, and then crash hard.
We are today at a P/E10 of 21, working our way down from…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Moolanomy blog entitled Stock Volatility Kills.
Juicy Excerpt: Don’t count all the gains you obtain from stocks as real. The U.S. economy has for a long time been sufficiently productive to finance an annual increase in stock prices of about 6.5 percent real. In years when stock prices go up by that much, the gains really are yours to keep. But in the 1990s there were years when stock prices went up by 20 percent or 25 percent or even 30 percent.…

I recently started a thread at the Early Retirement Extreme Forum titled Risk Revisited.
Juicy Excerpt #1: I view the attitude toward risk that Kevin is describing (he is accurately describing the Buy-and-Hold approach) as exceedingly dangerous. In all other areas of life endeavor, we think of risk as something to be avoided. When it comes to investing, we think of risk as something to be sought out. I believe that this is why we are in an economic crisis today. We have taught millions of…

Set forth below are links to seven Guest Blog Entries that I wrote on the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy:
1) A Better and Safer Way to Invest in Stocks, at the Free From Broke site;
2) The Five Big Benefits of Valuation-Informed Indexing, at the Canadian Finance Blog site;
3) Stock Investing Is a Political Act, at the Balance Junkie site;
4) The Coming Revolution in Our Understanding of How Stock Investing Works, at the My Personal Finance Journey site;
5) Are Investing…

Tom Drake, owner of the the Canadian Finance Blog, has posted a Guest Blog Entry of mine titled The Five Big Benefits of Valuation-Informed Indexing:
Juicy Excerpt: Buy-and-Hold purports to be a strategy for long-term investors. The reality, however, is that most Buy-and-Holders pay almost as much attention to the short-term ups and downs as stock investors have since the beginning of time. The reason is that Buy-and-Hold posits that price changes are the result of economic developments.…

Shadox at the Money and Such blog recently posted a blog entry entitled Passive Investing Is for Extremists: The Critque.
Juicy Excerpt: His main claim relates no so much to how you invest in stocks, but rather to the percentage of your portfolio that is invested in this asset class, regardless of which stocks or stock funds you put your money into. I think that it is more correct to say that Rob is against passive asset allocation, than he is against passive investing as I understand…

Set forth below are links to eight Guest Blog Entries that I have written on the Valuation-Informed Indexing investing strategy or that others have written commenting on it.
1) A Better Approach to Investing, by Michael Harr, at Wealth Uncomplicated.
2) Talk Back to the Investing Experts, at Save Buy Live.
3) The Bankers Did Not Do This to Us, at Weakonomics.
4) Passive Investing Is a Strategy for Extremists, at Money and Such.
5) Passive Investing Is for Extremists: The…

Set forth below are links to eight Guest Blog Entries that I wrote on the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy:
1) The Good Side of Stocks' Lost Decade, at the Consumerism Commentary blog;
2) Six Dangerous Investing Myths, at the Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance blog;
3) How To Use Valuation-Informed Indexing: Part One, at the Balance Junkie blog;
4) How To Use Valuation-Informed Indexing:Part Two, at the Balance Junkie blog;
5) Retirement Planning As If Valuations Mattered, at…

I've posted Entry #5 to my monthly column at the Balance Junkie site. It's called Five Things Tim Tebow Can Teach Us About Stock Investing.
Juicy Excerpt: The poll shows that the explanations people give for liking Tebow or Manning are rationalizations. People decide for emotional reasons who to support and then turn on the brainpower to concoct explanations for those emotional beliefs that sound sensible. When stocks are priced at three times fair value, there will be dozens of reasons…

I recently wrote a guest blog entry for the Four Pillars blog entitled The Curse of Pretend Money.
Juicy Excerpt: The reality is that your stock portfolio was never worth $1.5 million. The portfolio statement that led you to believe it was had been sent to you in January 2000, when stocks were priced at three times fair value. The real value of your stock portfolio on that day was $500,000, not $1.5 million. The extra $1 million was pretend money.
Lots of comments.
Some making solid…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Free from Broke site titled Playing Dominion vs. Playing the Market.
Juicy Excerpt: It’s possible to finish a game of Dominion in 30 minutes. Newcomers to the game make dumb mistakes the first time they play. They learn from those mistakes. They get better. Investing is a game that extends over 60 years of your life (if you start at age 25 and die at age 85). By the time we figure the game out, it’s…

The Financial Uproar blog has posted an article about my efforts to get the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies corrected entitled Rob Bennett: Crazy? Or Crazy Like a Fox?
Juicy Excerpt #1: I’ve always liked what Rob had to say. He has well thought out opinions about everything he writes. He’s clearly a very intelligent guy. So I decided to click through to his blog (A Rich Life) to see what he writes about. Turns out Rob is just a little crazy.
Juicy Excerpt #2:…

The Online Investing AI blog has posted my Guest Blog Entry titled All Stock Price Drops Help You, All Stock Price Gains Hurt You.
Juicy Excerpt: The mathematical realities are precisely the opposite of what I have described in the scenario set forth above. The first year, the one in which stock prices went down 30 percent, was the lucky one for investors. The second year, the one in which stock prices went up 30 percent, is the one which you should be cursing your bad luck. Price drops are…

Miranda Marquit recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Investor Junkie blog called How to Invest Using Valuation-Informed Indexing: Interview with Rob Bennett.
Juicy Excerpt: Rob Bennett has been advocating valuation informed indexing for years, and his insistence on it has even had him kicked off investing forums, including the Bogleheads forum. “Buy and hold is intellectually dead,” he says. “It’s not practically dead, since plenty of investors still use the theory, but…

I have posted a Guest Blog Entry at the My Personal Finance Journey blog. It is called Investors Who Ignore Valuations Are Like Overeaters Who Ignore the Risk of Heart Disease.
Juicy Excerpt: Raddr examines the numbers and concludes that: “The poor retiree’s real net worth has dropped nearly two-thirds (from $1,000 to $367) in only 11 years, and he is now withdrawing about 11 percent of his portfolio per year, which is a recipe for disaster even if the market heads up big-time from…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the www.MyRetirementBlog.com site. It's entitled What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Retirement Planning Turned Out To Be Wrong?
Juicy Excerpt: I never went to investing school. I never managed a big fund. It shouldn’t be possible for me to be the first person to develop a retirement calculator that gets the numbers right. I mean, come on! But the numbers generated by my retirement calculator are very different from the numbers generated by all…

I've posted the third entry to my monthly column at the Balance Junkie site. It's called Liberals Came Closer Than Conservatives With Their Explanation of the Economic Crisis.
Juicy Excerpt: The comedian John Stewart had a funny line re this aspect of the story. There was a debate in the early days that executives of firms in the financial sector should be denied bonuses because they would be out of work but for the bailouts they received from the U.S. taxpayers. One executive complained…

Set forth below are links to eight Guest Blog Entries on the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy and on the Passion Saving money management approach:
1) The Economic Crisis Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us, at the Hope to Prosper site;
2) The Truth About the Shiller P/E, at the Bad Money Advice site (this article is about Valuation-Informed Indexing but was not written by me);
3) Valuation-Informed Indexing/Emotional Market Theory, at the Value Investing Congress Group at…

The Daily Middle site has posted my Guest Blog Entry titled Don't Give Up on Stocks, Give Up on Buy-and-Hold.
Juicy Excerpt: Middle-class investors should be setting up web sites and discussion boards and blogs where we can talk about and learn about the realities of stock investing rather than the marketing mumbo jumbo that the stock selling experts push on us. The stock selling experts won’t like it if we start figuring things out for ourselves. But you know what? in the long run, an…

The www.Conservatives4Palin.com site has posted my Reader Submission titled How Ruing Class Stock Pushers Caused the Economic Crisis.
Juicy Excerpt: Why would experts say that Buy-and-Hold can work if it always causes an economic crisis? Stocks pay higher commissions than most alternative asset classes. It is in the short-term financial interests of those who make their living selling stocks to persuade middle-class people that stocks are always the best buy.
Some say that this is not a…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Free From Broke blog. It's called A Better and Less Risky Way to Invest in Stocks.
Juicy Excerpt: Let’s return for a moment to our discussion of cars and cameras and computers and comic books. If you were in the car business and you had somehow persuaded millions of your customers that cars were worth buying at any price imaginable, would you want the word to get out that this was nonsense?
You wouldn’t. You would want to keep the realities…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Balance Junkie site titled How to Use Valuation-Informed Indexing -- Part Two.
Juicy Excerpt: The smart Valuation-Informed Indexer prepares not only for the most likely outcome but for all other realistic possibilities. And the smart Valuation-Informed Indexer takes into consideration the emotional hit he will feel if he shifts to a low stock allocation because prices are high and stocks perform well for a few years or if he shifts to a high stock…

I've put a guest post to the Balance Junkie blog titled Stock Investing Is a Political Act.
Juicy Excerpt: We all have political views. And we all have investing views. Most of us don’t think of the two types of views as intersecting. Politics is the process by which we decide where we want to go as a society. Investing is personal. It’s the process by which each of us as individuals accumulates the money he or she needs to finance his or her retirement. How I invest is my concern alone,…

I've written a Guest Blog Entry for the Stock Trend Investing blog titled Long-Term Trend Investing.
Juicy Excerpt: There’s one big flaw to Buy-and-Hold, however. When stocks are overpriced, it can take a long, long time for investors to obtain the average long-term return of 6.5 percent real. The Buy-and-Hold advocates don’t like for investors to learn how long it can take for the average long-term return to apply. How does the idea of waiting 25 years to see a good return on your…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the MoneyCrush blog. It is called On Investing: Risk Could Be Almost Entirely Optional.
Juicy Excerpt: Many top-name people acknowledge the problem. The trouble is figuring out what to do about it. If people come out today and acknowledge that the retirement studies used by millions got the numbers wildly wrong, the millions of people who relied on those numbers are obviously going to be very upset. The other side of the story is that people will be…

I wrote a Guest Blog Entry re the new Returns-Sequence Reality Checker calculator that appears today at the Consumerism Commentary blog. It's called The Good Side of Stocks' Lost Decade.
Juicy Excerpt: The reason why I call the calculator “The Reality Checker” is that it throws doubt on one of our most fundamental beliefs about stock investing — that positive returns are good and that negative returns are bad. It’s not hard to understand why most of us think that. If your stock…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the Money and Such blog entitled Why Long-Term Timing Works Even Though Short-Term Timing Doesn't.
Juicy Excerpt: It turns out that those studies were misinterpreted. I mentioned that there are hundreds of studies showing that timing doesn’t work. Do you know how many of those studies examine whether long-term timing works or not? The answer is -- not one of them. All of the studies showing that timing doesn’t work examine short-term timing; they…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Hope to Prosper site titled The Economic Crisis Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.
Juicy Excerpt #1: there is today a mismatch between how we think stocks work and how stocks really do work that must be addressed and that the mismatch has been ignored for so long that a point was reached at which an economic crisis was the only way to force a change.
Juicy Excerpt #2: Things change. There have never before been millions of middle-class people…

Another super post and discussion thread at the Balance Junkie blog. This one is called History Only Rhymes.
Juicy Excerpt: Now I know that neither the Potato investors nor the Valuation Informed Index investors would claim that history will repeat itself exactly. They’re just using it to determine investment probabilities. That’s how I use historical data too. But I also like to incorporate a few other variables, which others may or may not find useful, but have served me well so…

Set forth below are links to eight Guest Blog Entries I've written on the Valuation-Informed Indexing investing strategy:
1) What's the Best Age at Which to Experience a Stock Crash?, at Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance;
2) A Better and Safer Way to Invest in Stocks, at the Foolish Blogging Network;
3) Playing Dominion vs. Playing the Market, at Free From Broke;
4) Stocks Are Not Risky for Those Willing to Tune Out the Wall Street Mumbo Jumbo; at Everyday Tips and Thoughts;
5)…

I recently posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Budgets Are Sexy blog entitled When Stock Prices Crash, Where Does the Money Go?
Juicy Excerpt: We can bid stock prices up to any level we want. We can all vote ourselves raises if we like. The only penalty is that, when we bid them up too high, they must crash back down in the following years. What is made from nothing must eventually return to nothing. It always happens that way. It always will happen that way. Now you know.
Lotsa good…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Everyday Tips and Thoughts blog titled Stock Investing Without All the Drama.
Juicy Excerpt: Buy index funds and you avoid the risk of picking bad stocks. But you take on another kind of risk — the risk of investing heavily in stocks at the wrong time. That 6.5 percent return is only an average. There have already been three times in U.S. history when stocks have provided an average 20-year return of 0.7 percent (including dividends).
Those who…

Shadox at the Money and Such blog recently posted a Guest Blog Entry by Schroeder, a regular at John Greaney's Goon Central board. It was called A Critique of Valuation-Informed Indexing.
Juicy Excerpt: A few weeks ago I published a guest post by Rob of A Rich Life. In doing so, it appears that I inadvertently stumbled into the middle of a religious war. Schroeder, a critic of Rob's, has asked me to post the critique which follows, and having read it, I thought I would share it with my…

I recently wrote a Guest Blog Entry for the My Journey to Millions blog. It's called The More You Know About Investing, the Less You Know About Investing.
Juicy Excerpt: The experts can learn new things faster than I can. They have all sorts of tools available to them to keep up with developments in the field. They’re driving 90 miles per hour while I’m poking along at 25. Still, I possess an edge. I’m driving at a far slower speed but in the right direction. It makes a…

Welcome to the July 2013 Carnival of Passive Investing, a monthly collection of the best and most intelligent Passive Investing strategy articles around the internet. Some people foolishly want to beat the market (want being the key word) but we just want to invest with it.
The purpose of the carnival is two-fold:
To provide a forum to showcase articles and research in passive investing strategies (i.e., investing in ETFs, index mutual funds, etc., in such a way that one avoids…

I've posted a Guest Blog Entry at the Control Your Cash site titled Index Funds Don't Work in Bear Markets.
Juicy Except: This approach (Valuation-Informed Indexing) sounds so easy and so rewarding and so rooted in common sense. Why doesn’t Mike Piper follow it? Why doesn’t everybody follow it?
Stock investing is an intensely emotional endeavor. When stocks were priced at three times fair value in 2000, the numbers on the bottom line of the last page of our portfolio statements…

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: Yes, I get that you are now 100% fixated on punishing me, rather than pursuing your own goals. If Wade’s paper gets written up in the New York Times, he gets all the glory and rewards. The first step is getting recognized experts like Bengen to acknowledge that he was the first. And that step is checked off. Of course, Wade could wave his hands and say “Shucks no, all this glory belongs to Rob Bennett. He’s the real brains behind any CAPE-based timing strategy.” Yes, that’s the ticket. That’s what will happen. Or you could take two minutes right now to set Bengen straight. Nope, you said that’s not an option. Anytime that anyone writes honestly about what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works, it benefits each and every one of us who is trying to do the same. There is no limit on the credit that can be handed out. Millions of investors need access to accurate information. Thousands of investment advisers want to give it to them. The thing that is standing in their way is a Wall of Ignorance. People cannot believe the realities — that we now know of a way to invest in stocks that is far less risky and that allows people to retire far earlier in life — because they just sound too good to be true. Anyone who does anything to knock down that wall is helping all of us in a big way. Say that Wade does as you say. I am not saying that I think he would — I do not. But just say for purposes of discussion that he did. That would be an absolute boon for me. If the study that Wade and I prepared gets publicized — regardless of who gets the credit for it — it instantly becomes easier to tell the truth about stock investing at hundreds of different sites. So all of my stuff — I’ve developed a lot of it over the years — gets out. How does that hurt me? You always talk as if the key to getting credit is being smarter than other people. That’s not the reality here. Most Buy-and-Holders possess more than enough […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: Uh oh, Rob. Bill Bengen points out the research and data that says you are wrong and that VII is a failure: “I have not studied in great detail the correlation between Shiller CAPE and withdrawal rate. However, Michael Kitces, a celebrated financial planner who has also done some important research in the area of withdrawal rates, produced an interesting chart some years ago. It showed a strong negative correlation between CAPE and each year’s safe withdrawal rates. So, I am not surprised at the conclusion that Wade reached, although I believe he may have been the first to quantify the “boost” to SAFEMAX by using a timing strategy. However, for those who wait for a low enough CAPE to invest fully in stocks, it has been a frustrating 25 years, as CAPE has been below its average of about 16 only about 25% of the time during that span (if that much). Today, of course, CAPE stands at more than twice its long-term average. It will be interesting to see if it does indeed “mean revert”, and even drop below its long term average. The only time that has happened in the last 25 years was for a few weeks in 2009. ” That last paragraph is power-packed stuff, Anonymous. I am grateful to you for sharing it with us. The claim that the last 25 years have been “frustrating” for Valuation-Informed Indexers is true only from the perspective of a Buy-and-Holder. Yes, if we have missed out on gains, then it could be viewed as frustrating. But the entire question in dispute is the question he puts on the table two sentences later when he questions whether prices will eventually mean revert or even drop below their long-term average. If that happens, the math shows that the Valuation-Informed Indexers will be far, far ahead of the Buy-and-Holders, too far ahead for the Buy-and-Holders to entertain any realistic expectations of ever catching up. Do I believe that prices are going to mean revert? 100 percent. I have never been more sure of anything in my life. Could I be wrong? 100 percent. I am one of those darn humans. We get them wrong all the time. All of us do. That includes me. We should […]

I’ve posted Entry #376 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk site. It’s called How Many Bull/Bear Cycles Are Required to Prove That Valuations Matter? Juicy Excerpt: I sometimes make the claim that 100 percent of the evidence available to us today supports Shiller’s view of how stock investing works and 0 percent supports Fama’s view. I of course understand that the statement strikes most Buy-and-Holders as extreme and absurd. But I advance the claim sincerely. It’s that hill-and-valley graphic showing how valuations play out in the long term that persuades me that the case is so strong. The hill-and-valley graphic applies for the entire history of the stock market. And it is logically incompatible with a belief in Buy-and-Hold. A visitor to my website asked me the other day how many times the hill-and-valley pattern has played out. The answer is four times. We came to the end of one bull/bear cycle in the early years of the 20th Century. We came to the end of a second at the onset of the Great Depression. The third ended with the stagflation of the 1970s. And we are presumably nearing the end of the fourth bull/bear cycle in our nation’s history today. Four completions of the cycle was not enough evidence to make the case for my friend. He asked me to get back to him when I can say that the same basic cycle has played out not four times but thirty times. Related PostsValuation-Informed Indexing #270: A Critic of Valuation-Informed Indexing Offers a Concise Case for Why Buy-and-Hold Is SuperiorValuation-Informed Indexing #269: Eight Questions That Should Be Keeping Buy-and-Holders Up at NightValuation-Informed Indexing #260 : Shiller’s Ideas Should Be Treated as Mainstream IdeasValuation-Informed Indexing #267: Take Valuations Seriously and You Will Discover Things That You Were Not Initially Even Seeking to DiscoverValuation-Informed Indexing #258: It Is Critical to Distinguish Returns-Sequence Risk from Valuations Risk When Calculating Safe Withdrawal RatesValuation-Informed Indexing #259: Return Predictions Are Implicit in All Investing Advice

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: Hi Rob. Come join us. Love, Robert, Wade, Bill and Michael We’ll all be working together in the days following the next price crash, Anonymous. The only difference is that there will be more human misery if we wait. I vote for us all pulling together today. But you know what? I only get one vote. Others get to decide what others do. So we will have to wait a bit to see how things play out. I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person. Rob Related Posts “We Will All Be in a Better Place When I Can Go to Any Discussion Board or Blog on the Internet and Post With 100 Percent Honesty and Not Have Any Concern Whatsoever That Intimidation Tactics Will Be Directed At Me. We All Do Our Best Work When We Feel Free to Follow Our Ideas Where They Lead Us As We Further Develop Them. I Want That for Everyone.”“I Have Raised the Possibility of an Amnesty for People Who Have Continued to Promote Buy-and-Hold Because They Once Truly Believed in it and Who Are Suffering Cognitive Dissonance re the Last 34 Years of Research Because It Is Just Too Hard for Them to Accept That They Got Something Wrong. But I Can’t Adopt an Amnesty By Myself. We Have to Get Congress Involved. We Need to Have a National Debate.”“After the Crash, the Floodgates Open. People Will Give Up Their Feelings of Embarrassment and Shame and Become Determined to Get Things Back on the Right Track. At That Point the Owners of the Bogleheads Forum Are Not Going to Be Resisting My Efforts to Take Over. They Are Gong to Be Asking Me to Take Over. We Are Going to Be Friends.”“If I Had the Power to Release You All of Your Prison Terms and Your Civil-Suit Liabilities and Your Various Embarrassments, I Would Do It In Two Seconds in Exchange for Your Willingness to Permit the National Debate That Thousands of Our Fellow Community Members Have Evidenced a Desire to See Proceed.”“Shiller Showed Us That It Is Primarily INVESTOR EMOTION That Determines Stock Prices, Not Economic Developments. So We All Need to Make a Switch to Talking Primarily About Investor […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: http://www.aaii.com/journal/article/insights-on-using-the-withdrawal-rule-from-its-creator#comments Bengen is asked about and comments about Wade, Shiller, Michael Kitces, FIRECalc, CAPE. There’s even a link to one of Wade’s papers (sadly, not the one you wrote.) This is an active comment thread, so there’s no excuse for you not jumping in. But you don’t. How can you just sit on the sidelines? You say you have the most important job in the world. This is right in your freakin wheelhouse. If you stay silent now, then obviously nothing will ever rouse you from your hibernation. I’m grateful for the link, Anonymous. I have commented at hundreds of places. The problem is certainly not that I have not commented enough. We have a problem as a society. Shiller provided us the last piece of the stock investing puzzle in 1981. Had he published his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings in 1961, there never would have been any Buy-and-Hold. But it didn’t happen that way. By the time Shiller showed that valuations affect long-term returns, we already had an entire industry built around Buy-and-Hold. All of the powerful and wealthy people who were making their living promoting Buy-and-Hold did not want their clients and readers and friends to realize that they had made a mistake. So they kept quiet about the far-reaching implications of what Shiller had done. They praised him, they patted him on the head, they patronized him, down the road a piece they even awarded him a Nobel prize. But they didn’t change any of their strategic recommendations to reflect his research findings. And, as time passed, it became harder and harder for them to acknowledge their mistake and thereby bring the cover-up to an end. It’s now been 36 years. It’s now not just hard to admit the mistake, as it would have been in 1981. It’s now very, very, very, very hard. I did not cause any of this. I came along in 2002, when I saw that Greaney got the numbers wrong in his retirement study and told my friends at the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board. Hundreds of them saw right away how important that post was. They said that I had started the most important discussion ever held in that board’s history. Greaney threatened to kill family […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: “But they have not emotionally taken in the knowledge that they possess so that they can make productive use of it. …The knowledge that they possess sits in their brains but they have not integrated it with their other thoughts” And don’t you think it’s a wee bit presumptuous to claim you know the inner working of the minds of thousands of people you’ve never met, many of whom you agree are far more intelligent and experienced than you are? I’m intelligent enough to see that there is no valuation adjustment in the retirement study posted at Greaney’s site, Anonymous. And I am intelligent enough to know that Shiller’s research showing that valuations affect long-term returns must be legitimate research or else he would mot have been awarded a Nobel prize for it. I am intelligent enough to know that there is no place for death threats in discussions of stock investing. And that there is no place for demands for unjustified board bannings. And that there is no place for thousands of acts of defamation. And that there is no place for threats to get an academic researcher fired from his job. If you have a better explanation for the events that we have seen transpire over the past 15 years, I would be happy to hear it. Neither you nor anyone else has even tried to put forward a better explanation. So, no, I don’t think it’s presumptuous at all. These events demand an explanation. And there is an explanation available in the psychological literature — cognitive dissonance. So that’s the one that I am going with until I hear something better. You don’t have to accept my explanation if you don’t care to. You asked me a question and I gave you an honest response. My explanation is 100 percent sincere. I am as intelligent as I am, no more and no less. And that’s what I have come up with at this point in the proceedings. I look for new insights every day. So perhaps down the road a bit I will be able to add some detail to it. My best wishes. Rob Related Posts“At the Very Bare Minimum, We Need to Make It a Practice to Tell Both Sides of […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: “Stocks are today priced at two times fair value.” To be clear, this is a fact Wall Street is not aware of – otherwise they would immediately dump stocks. Is that fair to say? You are making a great point here, Anonymous. If you would reflect on this point a bit, the entire matter would click for you. Just about everybody on Wall Street is aware intellectually of what the P/E10 level is today. You see it mentioned all the time in articles. These people are obviously not dumb. So on an intellectual level, they know what they need to know. But they have not emotionally taken in the knowledge that they possess so that they can make productive use of it. They rationalize away this knowledge that they possess. They tell themselves “oh, nobody knows when the crash is coming and I cannot afford to miss out on gains in the meantime” or whatever. The knowledge that they possess sits in their brains but they have not integrated it with their other thoughts on all of the various strategic questions and so it is as if the knowledge did not exist. It is passive knowledge. It is not being put to productive use. It helps to remember what happened in the famous psychology experiment from the 1950s, the Asch experiment. People were put in a room and asked to identify which of two lines — a 12-inch line and an 18-inch line — were longer. Their brains possessed all the knowledge needed to supply the correct answer. It was obvious to them that the 18-inch line was longer. But the four people who were plants and who spoke before them all identified the 12-inch line as longer. This psychological reality neutralized the knowledge they possessed. Humans are social creatures. Evolution put something within us that tells us “don’t go against the tribe no matter what your brain tells you.” So they told the person conducting the experiment that they “thought” the 12-inch line was the longer one. Their emotions cancelled out the product of their mental processes. All of these people on Wall Street “know” what it means to say that stocks are priced at two times fair value, Anonymous. But their emotions — their […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: Rob, It’s the same old thing, people think the party will never end. until it does. I have a friend who retired with $1million cash, his advisor told him to put it in the market in 2008. Well after a 60% loss he sold I guess anyone would. After this his advisor suggested going back in with the rest to “make his money back stocks, are cheap”. Well after all the dust settled he was left with $150,000. He cant go back to work and now he lives on SSI and depression. I myself have only 10% allocated to stocks now. Until you live through this or know someone who has you dont get it, the goons don’t because they cant be wrong. What really bothers me is the “common knowledge” that markets ALWAYS comes back? Really? all advisors say this, It is in all the financial articles on the web. I know I can’t remember the dates, but 7, 15, 20 years to recover. in the past,I for one do not want to sit and wait in fear hoping the market will come back for the rest of my life. Thank you for working so hard to get the word out, some of us get it Rob. Am I trying to get the word out or am I trying to learn myself? I think that the bottom line here is that I am trying to learn myself. There’s a message that I push. But, when you boil it all down, that message is: “Not one of us knows as much as he thinks he does, so we should all be willing to hear the other fellow out and learn what we can from someone coming at things from a different perspective.” That’s a process that serves us well in our efforts to learn in all other fields of human endeavor and it seems to me, that given how important investing is, it makes sense for us to apply the same learning process there that works in every other other field of human endeavor. Thanks for stopping by, Max. Non-Dogmatic Rob Related Posts“Part of the Job is to Describe the Pressures that Caused so Many Generally Good and Smart People Either to Participate in the Cover-Up […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: “It’s his abusiveness.” Really? Here are just a few of your quotes from those pesky Post Archives. “The “4 percent rule” has caused millions of busted retirements” “When you calculate the SWR accurately, you find that the withdrawal rate that is described in the Old School studied as “100 percent safe” has only a one in three chance of working out for those who retired at the top of the bubble. That means that there are going to be millions of busted retirements resulting from just this one error” “I think the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies caused millions of busted retirements by getting the numbers so wildly wrong.” “There are going to be millions of busted retirements resulting from the demonstrably false claims put forward in the Old School safe-withdrawal rates studies.” There’s no conflict between those statements and what I am saying here. The 4 percent rule will have caused millions of failed retirements in the days following the next crash (we obviously will not have any problem if it turns out that the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is not legitimate research). Who is responsible for those millions of failed retirements? If it was all a mistake, no one was responsible. If it all was a mistake, then we all just have to be careful not to repeat the mistake. But that’s not the situation that we are dealing with. I pointed out the mistake in a post that I put to the Retire Early board at the Motley Fool site on the morning of May 13, 2002. Thousands of our fellow community members expressed excitement over the post, saying that they saw it as the most valuable post in the history of the board. Big-name experts like Rob Arnott endorsed the post, saying it checks out with what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research says in every way and that it opens up the way to hundreds of big advances in our understanding of how stock investing works. A fellow with a Ph.D. in Economic saw how excited people were over the things they were learning in the debate that followed the post asked me if I would be willing to co-author research showing that this post led us […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: “I believe that Greaney has caused millions of failed retirements.” Exactly how? You’re still waffling on that. If it’s his 4% rule you should forget about nobody Greaney and focus on famous Bengen, who says 4.5%. If Greaney busted millions of retirements, Bengen certainly busted billions. If it’s Greaney’s abusiveness, how does his abuse bust the retirements of millions of people who never heard of either of you? It’s his abusiveness. Greaney didn’t come up with the 4 percent rule. He is not responsible for the intellectual mistake. I don’t think it would be fair to blame the people (like Bengen) who ARE responsible for the intellectual mistake for the millions of failed retirements. People made mistakes. That’s just one of those things. There is no evidence that the mistake was intentional, that the aim was to cause millions of failed retirements. So I don’t see that there is any blame to cast there. Greaney’s abusiveness IS intentional. That’s why I cast blame on him in a way that I do not cast blame on Bengen or lots of others. You suggest that Greaney’s abusiveness has not hurt the millions of people who have never heard of him or me. I disagree. I built the Retire Early board at Motley Fool into the #1 discussion board at that site with a purpose in mind — I wanted to teach millions of people how to achieve financial independence early in life. It was my intent to spread the word about what we learned about safe withdrawal rates to everyone on the planet. Greaney blocked that process from moving forward with his criminally abusive behavior. Wade Pfau and I intended to work together to get our grounds-breaking study showing that Valuation-Informed Indexing is superior to Buy-and-Hold featured on the front page of the New York Times. Greaney stopped that from happening by threatening to get Wade fired from his job if he continued doing honest work in this field. He destroyed millions of middle-class lives with that criminal act. Has anyone ever been more deserving of a long prison sentence? Valuation-Informed Indexing is a pure good. It’s all upside and zero downside. And millions of middle-class people who very much need access to honest and informed reports of […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: Just because you were able to browbeat Wade into emailing the Trinity guys doesn’t mean I’ll do your bidding too. Set up your own damn forum. But I promise I’ll read the historical transcript. Okay. Related PostsGoon Poster to Rob: “You Have Stated What You Think Are Problems. People Have Responded As to How They Disagree. People Eventually Got Angry Because of Repetitive Comments Going in Circles.”“Part of the Job is to Describe the Pressures that Caused so Many Generally Good and Smart People Either to Participate in the Cover-Up or at the Minimum Tolerate It. I Post These Goon Conversation Blog Entries to Help People Come to a Full Understanding of What Happened.”“Wade Pfau Never Wrote Any Words of That Nature Until You Threatened to Send Defamatory E-Mails to His Employer. Words That Are Said As the Result of Intimidation Tactics Don’t Count. Wade Said What He Really Believes About Safe Withdrawal Rates and About Valuation-Informed Indexing and About Me in Hundreds of E-Mails That He Exchanged With Me, Many of Which I Have Reported on at My Site.”Rob Bennett to Wade Pfau: “It is 100 Percent Wrong That People Posting at Bogleheads Feel Intimdated re Posting My Name…. By Using My Name, You Help Others Get Over Their Feelings of Intimidation”“After the Crash, the Floodgates Open. People Will Give Up Their Feelings of Embarrassment and Shame and Become Determined to Get Things Back on the Right Track. At That Point the Owners of the Bogleheads Forum Are Not Going to Be Resisting My Efforts to Take Over. They Are Gong to Be Asking Me to Take Over. We Are Going to Be Friends.”Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: We Have Only Your Word That Wade Ever Said That, or Ever Even Mentioned VII By Name. He Certainly Says Nothing of the Kind Today. In Fact, To You, He Says Nothing At All.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: “I think Bengen is wrong. I think that I have a responsibility to say so.” And so you do. Here, behind his back. But you won’t express your math-free gut-feel opinion in a comment section where he might see it. How is that living up to your responsibility? No. I engaged in an e-mail conversation with Bengen a number of years back. I told him that I think he is wrong re safe withdrawal rates. Set up a debate at the Bogleheads Forum. We can have Bengen there. We can have me there. We can have Bogle there. We can have Shiller there. We can have Greaney there. We can have Linduaer there. We can have Pfau there. See how it goes. No death threats. No demands for unjustified board bannings. No thousands of acts of defamation. No threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. We’ll make history. Rob Related PostsGoon Poster to Rob: “You Have Stated What You Think Are Problems. People Have Responded As to How They Disagree. People Eventually Got Angry Because of Repetitive Comments Going in Circles.”“We Should Be Asking Bogle Where He Got That Number If He Did Not in Fact Pull It Out of His Backside. Since He’s Available at the Bogleheads Forum and Appears at the Annual Meeting, That’s the Perfect Place to Put Him on the Hot Seat.”Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “I and Many Others Are Confident in Buy–Hold-and-Rebalance. You Seem to Be the Only One Confident in Valuation-Informed Indexing.”Goon Poster at Value Walk Site: “All One Needs to Do Is Read Your Posts and See That the Vast Majority of Your Posts Include Complaints About What You Think of Shiller, Bogle, Pfau and Others. You Want to Talk About Taking People Down, Down, Down. Just Read Your Own Posts.”“Most People Who Agree With Shiller Hold Back From Exploring All the Implications of His Ideas Publicly. That’s Why Valuation-Informed Indexing Has Only Won Over 20 Percent of the Population in 34 Years. I Want It to Win Over 100 Percent of the Population. So I Say Things in the Way in Which They Must Be Said for Us to Get to 100 Percent.”“It’s ALL a Guide. But You Buy-and-Hold Goons Don’t ACT Like It’s All a […]

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site: It makes perfect sense. You despise Greaney. You just won’t say that, so you blindly attack his work. Do you know how many Google hits there are out there for “rob bennett” “millions of busted retirements”? Lots. And the cause of all those busted retirements? The 4% rule. Now, magically, you have no problem with it. 4%, 4.5%, whatever, it’s all good, let’s just get along. Today you say “Greaney has destroyed millions of middle-class lives with his insanely abusive behavior.” Which is absurd, but it clearly shows your problem with him is personal. Until someone says it’s personal. Then the problem is back to the 4% rule. I don’t despise John as a person even a tiny bit. I had a lot of good times with the guy. I never would have had those times if he had not started that Retire Early board. When I was starting work on the book that became “Passion Saving,” I asked John to be my co-author. Why would I do that if I despised him? This claim makes no sense. And it’s not right to say that I blindly attack his work. I reviewed his retirement study when he published it as a report at the Soapbox.com site. I gave it a five-star review. I felt a little funny about doing that because I knew at the time (but had not come out publicly and said so) that he got the numbers wrong in his study. I rationalized what I did on grounds that his study was a significant advance on the retirement literature that was in place before he came on the scene. I still believe that to be the case. Peter Lynch was the manager of the Magellan fund. He was a pretty big deal. Lynch said that the safe withdrawal rate was 7 percent. Greaney said it was 4 percent. Greaney was a lot closer to the mark than Lynch was. Not bad for a guy whose only qualifications to write about the subject were that he (like me) had figured out how to get his words posted to an internet site. So I like the guy as a person and I admire his work. But, yes, you are right that I believe that Greaney […]